Page 67 of We Were Eternal Once

Is this what you meant? That there were times the compulsion fails? Or was it people that it fails to work on?

How had we travelled for so long and so far, and this is the first I’m seeing of it?

“Zora,” she says, giving a curtsy while I stare at her, mouth agape. “You are not the first that is too charmed to speak.”

“What?” is all I can muster.

“My name is Zora,” she says, slower this time, as though speaking to a simpleton.

“Melinoë,” I reply, my words far ahead of my thoughts.

“We shall meet tomorrow, under this arcade, an hour after sundown. How does that sound?” she asks.

“No,” I reply, taking a step toward her. Do I steal her away to the house, lock her up and study her? Starve her until she’s too weak to resist compulsion? How do I best understand what allows her to evade compulsion?

“Then you’ll never get this back,” she says, holding up the bracelet I’d just secured from the merchant. I close my hand over my naked wrist. How did she take it from me without my knowing?

“Thief,” I hiss.

“The two of us, I think,” she says with a wink. I reach out to grab my bracelet back but she’s uncommonly quick for a human. I pause, opening my senses to her. Her heart beats in her chest, her eyes are a dull brown—she is human. There is something about her that separates her from the others in the street, but I cannot place what it is.

“And you’ll show me how to do that?” I ask, pointing to the bracelet wrapped within her fingers.

“An even trade of skills?” Zora considers, tapping her cheek as though in thought. “I accept.”

“Tomorrow, then,” I agree.

“Tomorrow,” she says.

I wait a few moments before following after her. I will hunt her into a shadowed corner and then I will take my bracelet back. Perhaps I will feed on her, or maybe I’ll just kill her. I hadn’t decided yet.

She’s gone. Somehow I’d lost her—no, she’d lost me. I listen, I smell, I try everything I know to find her, but she is a ghost in the night. I’d never had to work hard to find my prey, compelling them meant they never fought me. I was sorely out of practice for a real hunt.

I stand beneath a lantern and smile, then laugh.

Perhaps there is something to the affairs of humans after all.

Cracks

“Come, sing for me.” You sit at the piano, your fingers tracing the keys. You’d learned to play it several years ago, but I’d not heard a song since coming to Paris.

Then again, I’m very rarely in our home.

I hunt alone. I go to the salon alone. I walk the streets of Paris alone. I am so rarely in your company these days, I almost forgot we live together.

(“Don’t they say if you love something, set it free?”)

Set it free?

I was not set free by you. I pulled away and you watched with disinterest. You never asked to join me on my hunts, to see where I went when I was without you.

Set me free. How dare you?

“Sing?” I ask.

“Yes,” you say, not taking your eyes off those keys.

“Now?”